Will the BI portal last?

Almost all vendors have been moving to a consolidated web portal to expose BI assets to end users. I have to question the validity of making our users come to a portal when they clearly need to integrate intelligence into other aspects of their computer use. Is there a need to change the paradigm of "come and get" it BI?

I think to some extent there is a need to change how we think about building BI applications. We tend to extract out just the information requirements from our end users and neglect to capture their overall business process in the picture. If we look at this bigger picture, we will see opportunities to potentially automate decisions and to make the Business Intelligence technology more transparent in the process.

Today's BI platforms have capabilities to integrate directly within office applications, and through a service oriented architecture can expose any type of BI asset to any other application or service. There are even capabilities to expose reports as RSS feeds, that can even deliver content such as a fully rendered reports directly to the users reader software of choice. Let's use these capabilities to delivery more effective solutions and make the end user experience simpler.

We are hearing the catch phrase "pervasive BI" in the industry more and more. As people get busier and busier in their working lives, we need to provide them with the right amount of data to make the right decision at the right time. This is the promise of pervasive BI, take the strategy out of the board room and bring it to the front lines.

Yes, we will likely always have some type of BI portal to provide access to reports and other content. Let's not lose sight of other ways for our end users to interact with corporate information. By taking their overall process into account, we can integrate the required information in the most effective way for the organization.

The Next Step in a BI Vision

In my post on Creating a Positive Future, I discussed the importance of understanding Business Intelligence requirements from the perspective of your end users.  Once you understand the user experience you need to provide, you are able to ensure that your delivery on this vision meets expectations.

Ok, so now you know what your users are looking for.  Great!  Let's jump in and start building the solution!

Not so fast...  We need to prepare the organization for this massive shift towards an intelligent, fact-based decision making organization.

In a number of my earlier posts I have discussed the Business Intelligence Competency Centre (BICC) as a key component to ensure Business Intelligence projects and resources are aligned to business priorities.  As we spread our wings with Business Intelligence tools it is absolutely critical that we have the underlying processes in place to support both the developers and users of the technology.  Without the appropriate organizational and process support we will not be successful realizing the benefits of Business Intelligence.

There are a number of books available that provide a good overview of a BICC.  One that I have found useful is the "Business Intelligence Competency Center: A Team Approach to Maximizing Competitive Advantage" written by a group of SAS staffers.  It is written vendor neutral, with just a little marketing pitch...8)  I would also encourage you to reach out to your Business Intelligence platform vendors and solution partners, as they will likely have experience launching a competency centre and may have their own methodologies you can borrow from.  It can be invaluable to have a neutral 3rd party help you with this process, so that you can leverage their experience.  That is if you can afford it!

Stay tuned for more thoughts about the BICC over the next couple of months.

I Dream of Data

For those of you that aren't certified "data geeks", you would probably not understand dreaming of data.  For some of us this love affair is new, and for some of us this has been a long standing obsession.

I clearly remember the first time I got the data bug.  It was an entry level database programming course and the lab assignment was to build and execute SQL scripts (inserts, deletes, updates, selects) against a provided data model using an Oracle (v5 I think) database.  It just seemed so natural to examine the data model and the problem and just pick what you wanted and join tables to build "grids" of data.  The career path in IT was set from the 2nd year in university!

Throughout my career, I have always been fascinated by manipulating data to gain insight into what is happening in the business of my organizations.  This has fostered a deep appreciation for the value of Business Intelligence, but on a larger scale an appreciation for how overall data management is critical to the success of an organization.  The Business Intelligence discipline must be supported by other components of an Enterprise Information Management (EIM) strategy such as Master Data Management (MDM), Data Governance, Data Architecture, and Data Quality Management to provide maximum value to an organization.  To forge ahead without engaging the rest of your IT department in treating data as an asset is a recipe for frustrated teams and ineffective solutions.

So when I fall asleep, I dream of a perfect environment where all pieces of an Enterprise Information Management strategy are in place.  Sometimes I feel like I am drawn to a big light at the end of a long corridor filled with data.  When I finally get to the end I see beautiful visualizations of information presented by my local Business Intelligence portal, harnessing all the inherent value in my beautifully managed data sources.  This is a big dream, but what dream worth pursuing is easy?

Good night, sleep tight!

Ensuring BI Projects don't Fail

Presentation from Timo Elliott, Business Objects.  Great slides!

Why Business Intelligence Projects Fail -- And What To Do About It

Mark

Translating Back

Interesting article on how BI applications have to be traced back through the Systems Development Life Cycle to become business information again.  Here is a diagram from the article:

http://www.b-eye-network.com/view/index.php?cid=7566

Mark

Article on Pushing the BI Limits

This is a link to a great presentation by Timo Elliot a Senior Director with Business Objects. This is one of the best presentations I have seen on pushing BI to the limit!

http://www.timoelliott.com/blog/2008/06/delivering_results_with_busine.html

Mark

Squeezing the value out of what you have

Ran across this interesting post about how you can replace just the pieces of your mainframe application that require the most change, and doing it with an external business rules management system (BRMS).

http://smartenoughsystems.com/wp/2008/05/28/making-meals-from-your-mainframe-leftovers/

If you think about this, you can apply it to the BI spaces as well.  I can think of a couple places where this would apply.

1. Data marts, if you build your data marts properly, they are much less costly to enhance than to replace.  Rather than spinning up another data mart to get the slice of data you are looking for, you could leverage an existing data mart and add the data required to it.  This may require some retooling of the front end reports / dashboards if the existing data structure changes, but this is much less costly than having to build, support and store another data mart.
2. Tools, if your toolset doesn't support your current requirements, don't lose heart and buy yet another tool.  Work with your senior technical folks to come up with a way to extend the platform, there may be exposed services that can be recombined into something new.  Also, reach out to your vendor, explain your requirements and you would be amazed at what they can dig up from other customers.  Lobby your vendor to include new functionality in their next release.  The whole idea of crowd-sourcing is picking up steam, so the majority of vendors are working hard to include customer requests in their products.

Do less with more!

Mark

Don't Let Budgets Hold You Back

Just read an article from the Data Warehousing Institute on how to move forward with data warehousing / business intelligence initiatives when you have limited funding and resources available to you.  The idea is to use these techniques to provide visible business wins that should translate into additional funding being available for your BI program.

This is actually a 3 part article that looks at the problem from 3 perspectives (click to see article):

• Technology & Tools - How to leverage what you already have / expanding on existing vendor relationships.
• People - The typical roles required on a data warehousing project and how to combine them
• Project Selection - Steer around projects that require significant resources and have high complexity, instead go for the quick wins or low hanging fruits.

Good read for anyone in the field, we don't need a 10 pound sledgehammer to nail a picture to the wall!

Mark

BI's Place in the IT Portfolio

Good morning, ran across an interesting article on where Business Intelligence fits within an overall IT portfolio.  The below is an interesting picture of this:

Nice to see this on top of the chain isn't it?  8)  Here is the link:

http://www.b-eye-network.com/view/index.php?cid=7498

Creating a Positive Future

If you have spent any time on the Internet researching a topic like Business Intelligence / Knowledge Management, it can be very overwhelming when you consider all the pieces that need to be implemented to have your organization on the leading edge in this field.  This is not just a technology evolution, you also must consider the people and process components to implement a successful Business Intelligence program.  Especially in today's business world, an organization has to find a balance between keeping the current operations running to respond to the latest market opportunity, and building strategic capabilities to support the future and provide competitive advantage.

This is a daunting task, so where to begin?  If you have done any reading on the power of positive thinking you may have run across references to "Creating a Positive Future".  The idea is that if you can en-vision what you would like things look like in the future, then you can work backwards to get there.  Think of it as a top-down rather than a bottom-up approach.

Your first step is to approach this from the experience you want your clients to have.  You must start by talking to your users to understand what business pain points you can solve for them.  Now if you are in a situation where they don't currently have a lot of BI capabilities, you will likely here a lot about what you are not providing now.  That is ok, you need to understand these pain points to ensure you cover them off in your future state.  In an organization more mature in leveraging information, you will hopefully hear about some great new opportunities that BI technology can help with.

Start by working from a what is possible perspective.  Don't burden yourself with the current limitations of people, funding or technology as this will in turn limit your vision.  Build a vision based on your experiences, research on what other companies are doing, but most importantly spend time with your clients to ensure you fully understand what they are looking for.

If you focus on what is possible, instead of what you aren't doing today you can build a positive future for the implementation of BI in your organization.  Watch out for future posts on the next steps to develop your BI roadmap once you have this vision.

P.S.  This is my first post using Windows Live Writer to post to Blogger.com.  Works great!  A big thank you to my colleague Frank Vandongen for suggesting it.

Turning Data into Information is Just the Beginning

Final day for me at the Semantic Technology conference in San Jose. I ended this trip with a renewed appreciation for the bigger picture of knowledge management to create and leverage true Intelligence for an organization. In some organizations we are so focused on turning raw data into usable information, we sometimes lose sight of how we can continue to add value to our information assets to turn them into a true competitive advantage.

The following picture shows the full story on the "Intelligence Pyramid" that will add exponentially more value to an organization. I won't take credit for this pyramid, sometimes referred to the "Wisdom Pyramid", but I will share my personal recreation of it.



Lets walk through these 4 stages starting at the bottom, and provide some additional context:

• Data - This can be described as the raw data that would typically support a company's operational processes. For all you ETL buffs, the "Source System". - "What is happening?"


• Information - Transformed information that is not in IT terms, but in business terms and is consumable by the business for reporting and analytical needs. - "What does it mean?"


• Knowledge - Taking the Information we have prepared in the previous step and enriching it with relationships and correlations that start to "tell the story" of what an organization's data contains. - "What do we already know and why?"


• Intelligence - The holy grail, we have leveraged all the previous stages to put all this data to work to develop action plans to resolve the business problem or challenge. - "What do we do?"

This is the true power of data! This goal can not be accomplished by traditional BI tools and techniques alone. We need to add a mix of other technologies that are better at representing relationships and data (i.e. semantic technology), and most importantly to bring together the right people to look at all this data from their different perspectives. With the right mix, we can deliver value to the organization that will pay back the investment in data many, many times over.

Mark

Ontologies Applied to Business Intelligence

After a full day of seminars at the Semantic Technology conference, I ran into an interesting tool that is "new to me". This tool is called Ontology.

An ontology is a formal representation of a set of concepts within a domain and the relationships between those concepts.

OK, I have to admit this is a pretty high level and cerebral topic, lets put this in the context of an example to make it real. Lets say we have a business problem (i.e. the domain) that involves displaying a customer's invoice online. If you think about it, this problem typically has the following entities involved:

• Customer
• Product
• Marketing Strategy
• Person
• Invoice

Does this seem like an exercise in Entity Relationship (ER) modelling? Well to a certain extent it is, but the value an ontology adds on top of this is how these entities are related. This still seems like ER modelling, but lets see how this plays out...

• A Customer subscribes to Products
• A Customer is a Person
• A Marketing Strategy acquires Customers
• A Marketing Strategy sells Products
• An Invoice belongs to a Customer
• An Invoice has Products
• An Invoice includes Marketing Strategies (Bill Messages)
• A Person creates a Marketing Strategy

Are all you data modellers out there feeling confused by all these relationships? 8) Real world relationships seldom fall into the typical hierarchical relationships so common in ER modelling. To fully describe the richness of all relationships we have to step back from the physical data structure and build out a separate meta data store that does not care about the structure, but does care about the context of the data and its relationships. This is typically stored within a database as a Triplestore, which breaks down relationships into "subject" "predicate" and "object".

A Person (subject) creates (predicate) a Marketing Strategy (object)

If each of these 3 pieces had a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) that uniquely identified each piece, a deceptively simple data model can be created to handle any object and any relationship. In this way any object in the system can be related to any other object using 1 data model.

Once we have this ontology, the next logical step is to map this ontology to the physical data. This not only helps business users navigate data, it is a great tool to facilitate data integration efforts as we can map any data source against the business focused ontology.

What is the value of this for Business Intelligence? In the BI field we are constantly striving to take data and turn it into actionable intelligence. If we had a rich meta data layer that contained a validated ontology we could use this data to uncover correlations in data that would not be uncovered through a simple ER model. As the ontology is in business language it serves as a great tool to bridge the gap between physical data and business entities. This facilitates communication of the organization's data assets between business and IT to ensure no bit or byte goes un-leveraged.

This is but one tool to allow us to bring our users into the development of their applications, better yet lets get the business to own this "layer" since they know it best!

Mark

Comments Opened

Just a quick note to let you know that I have removed the requirement for users to be signed in to post comments to hopefully encourage more participation in this blog. You will have to do one of those pesky words embedded within images thought...8)

Semantic Technology Conference 2008 - Questions

Well, I’m in sunny San Jose now, and am preparing for my first day at the Semantic Technology Conference. Before I dive into the seminars, I think it is important to step back and understand what specific questions I am trying to answer by attending this conference.

Here we go:

· How can we bridge the gap between information and human understanding to make information actionable?

· How do we build a business model that represents how the organization perceives it’s products, service and customers? How can we put such a business model in place to help us organize information in a way that it is accessible and takes us to the next level of comprehension?

· How can we leverage user-generated semantic data to enhance applications to add context?

· How can we create a data discovery process that is intuitive and returns results?

· How does Semantic Technology apply to both Business Intelligence and a Service Oriented Architecture?

I’ll throw these questions out for now, and will look to answer them over the next 3 days. I’ll be posting updates to this blog as I have time between sessions. If you have any input on the above, please comment away!

Mark

Foundational Concept for Performance Management and Data Quality

I was going through my reading, and ran across this article on the B-Eye-Network that talks about the foundational concepts that need to ground a Data Quality program. Part of this article discussed the Deming Cycle (PDSA Cycle). The PDSA acronym stands for the following:

• Plan - Plan for the future desired state
• Do - Execute actions to get to future state
• Study - Check the results against desired state
• Act - Act to correct towards desired state

This is a foundational concept that we can apply to both Data Quality programs and the use of Key Performance Indicators in a performance management system. In the data quality program we would apply the PDSA model as follows:

• Plan - Define data quality issues in a given data source
• Do - Put in place monitoring tools to analyze data quality
• Study - Analyze the results to understand issues and identify root causes
• Act - Act on root causes (typically process issues) and fine tune monitoring tools

Similarily, when we define and use Key Performance Indicators we might approach it this way:

• Plan - Define a set of KPIs that are thought to be critical to business success
• Do - Collect data on actual performance against the KPIs
• Study - Analyze the results to validate KPI effectiveness and to search for other supporting factors of success
• Act - Fine tune KPIs from learnings to improve overall performance management

If we look at this type of process as a framework, we can use it to build more effective processes that are rooted in an iterative approach to improving quality and value. With this type of execution you can climb any hill by taking small, measured steps. A word of caution however, you may suddenly realize you are climbing the wrong hill...8)

Good night,

Mark

Links for May 11, 2008

An interesting article that questions the need for a data warehouse for every Business Intelligence project. This parallel's the move to Web 2.0 in BI technology as this data is not likely to be stored in the data warehouse.

http://www.b-eye-network.com/view/index.php?cid=7344

Heading to the Semantic Technology Conference on May 19th, should have some good posts from the road. Check out the website at:

http://www.semantic-conference.com

Mark

Dealing with Culture

How does the culture of the organization impact the adoption of Business Intelligence?

This is a great question we need to ask ourselves as we move the vision of Business Intelligence forward in our organizations. Depending on the organization, your BI program will be successful based on how the program aligns to the culture of the company.

For example, lets envision a culture where finding cost efficiencies is a core mission of the organization. Think of some type of commoditites industry where margins are razor sharp, and every .001% improvement can be what makes or breaks the organization's profitability that year.

In this type of pragmatic organization, you would entirely miss the boat if you came in with a solution that provides demographics on their customer base and opens up new opportunities for them. In this type of culture, they may not be looking for new opportunites. We just want to procure it, process it and sell it on the open market! Beware those BI practitioners that stray from a services industry...8)

This is a pretty crude way to point out that you need to know your organization and it's culture to understand how to position your BI strategy. Tailor your approach using vocabulary and outcomes that align with organizational culture and you will be saying the right things to be successful.

Have a good night!

Mark

Don't Forget About the Competency Centre!

Ok, I have to admit it, I've been spending a lot of my research time looking into trends in Business Intelligence technology and have not been focusing on the organizational structures necessary to support all these cool technologies and capabilities. *sigh* The danger of letting the technologist in me rule the day!

Thankfully with all the feeds I have coming into my news reader I have diversified enough to capture articles that pertain to not just the technology, but the people and underlying procesess necessary for a true enterprise Business Intelligence strategy.

The Business Intelligence Competency Centre or BICC is a key enabler to ensure we spend our money on the right BI investments and don't fall into the trap of siloed solutions with departmental implementations. As we push more and more power into the hands of our end users, the inherent danger is that we lose all that lovely centralized control the IT organization had over what reporting / BI applications are built and enhanced. For all your type A's out there this is a big blow I know...8)

If we ensure we join IT and the business together through a BICC then we have the ability to make informed business decisions on BI priorities and funding to extract the most value from these investments. Here is the article that brought this point back home to me if you are looking for a refresher (hint, if you work for me read it!).

http://www.b-eye-network.com/view/index.php?cid=7297

Another area of research that is consuming my time is leveraging a rules based SOA architecture to inject analytics and intelligence into business processes. As I blogged before, here are some great blogs on this subject. There is an interesting parallel between rules based systems and future BI implementations. The standard mantra is that an IT organization can never keep up with the demand for changes and additions to information systems, we can only truly be successful by leveraging the business community to not only co-develop solutions but to author new solutions without the intervention of IT. When this is the case we can know we have empowered our clients with information in their hands to drive the most value from corporate data.

Then we can focus on the technology...8P

Mark

Back to Basics

Ran across this article on the B-Eye Network that takes some time to revisit the definition of Business Intelligence and how Business Analytics realizes value for investments in other Business Intelligence competencies (Data Integration, Reporting, Infrastructure, etc).

http://www.b-eye-network.com/view/index.php?cid=7133

I recommend taking the time to read this article, it really helps to bring focus back to what should be the rmission of every Business Intelligence organization. Here is a clip from the article on the BI value chain, we should all have this on the wall of our workspaces!

Happy Sunday,

Mark

Great Overview of Web 2.0 and Business Intelligence

Here is the first of a four part series from the B-Eye Network on how Web 2.0 applies to Business Intelligence. I heartily recommend you read them all!

http://www.b-eye-network.co.uk/view-articles/5913

Mark